“Our Natural and Original Illness”: Tracking the Human/Animal Distinction in Montaigne and Nietzsche

This article examines a certain subterranean counter-conception of the human/animal distinction that occasionally surfaces in the Western literary-philosophical tradition. Focusing on Michel de Montaigne and Friedrich Nietzsche (particularly Apologie de Raimond Sebond and Zur Genealogie der Moral), I demonstrate how each writer’s assault on the human/animal distinction relies on a sophisticated revaluation of the canonical humanist position of Pico della Mirandola, a position that each thinker (to some extent) can be said to reposit under a negative valence.